41–50 of 157 posts
- Programming Languages (and then Compilers, my favorite)
- Algorithms
- Operating Systems
At a decent school with some level of difficulty, you'll learn the big picture while doing fun projects for homework, along with history.
Programming is a craft, not a science, but it overlaps with math in a lot of places.
Fascinating show, mostly about micros but featuring early industry legend Gary Kildall.
The software reviews are hilarious. The predictions of the future of computing always wrong. The guests demoing stuff always cut off as soon as it gets interesting.
I started programming as a teenager in that era but never saw the show in period. For me its eye opening just how amateur the industry really was. The show is unintentionally funny now, but really gives a great idea of the time period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was looking at a vintage computer, so yeah that's a possible route. Been using emulators so far but it's not the real thing. Thanks.
I'd say if you have experience with vintage computer then it's probably worthwhile to get one. However just work with an emulator if it's not too exciting to hold a real machine because the cost of maintenance might be pretty high.
My very first introduction to anything "old" tech was through the TechStuff podcast[0] (re: 2011-era episodes, so sort by oldest).
More recently the On The Metal podcast[1] has been a really cool deep dive into old tech history, especially the episode (season 2) with John Graham Cumming.
About implementations, my first real playing around with assembly was "Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly in 28 days"[2].
[0]: https://player.fm/series/techstuff-2152808
From September 2021:
A new history of modern computing
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-history-modern-computing
Skip around it’s various chapters, it’s fun of little details.
Also a fun read, this old article about the silicon in Silicon Valley, it’s from a long dead magazine and it’s titled They Would be Gods:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9mi2aqnyf5fp3l/They%20Would%20Be%...
Lastly, the part I enjoyed the most of Walter Isaacsons bio on Jobs, was the adjacent history.
There are also several good museums dedicated to the subject. I used to work for the national museum of computing at bletchley park in the UK, and there they have a lot of good exhibits that teach basics of how computers and networking works and has evolved over the years. Another good approach one can take to learn is starting with a simple system with well-defined rules, and making a simple computer out of it. Many…
You might want to look into how the idea of computation came out of mathematical work in the early twentieth century. The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold is good if you're up for some maths.
Aerospace and spaceflight were some of the first activities that required large-scale software development. You could check-out Starburst and Luminary by Don Eyles and Digital Apollo by David Mindell.
[1] The author's father was Freman Dyson who was at the Institute for Advanced Study (at Princeton) with Einstein, Gödel and others.
- Turing’s Cathedral, by George Dyson
- Black Software, by Charlton McIlwain
- Programmed Inequality, by Mar Hicks
The Dyson book is a rigorous and deep historical dive into the philosophical and practical origins of digital computing, and is really great.
The other two are equally great and deep but cover computing history through different lenses. The Hicks book in particular may be of interest for you, as its emphasis is on the history of computing in the UK. They’re less directly about how computers “work”, as such, and more about how computers and society have interacted with one another in interesting and non-obvious ways, and how those interactions have impacted the ways in which technologies have developed.